Epistle to a Good Friend in Italy

would they not recognize it as their own? You know that it is so. How you retain barely a few words of the true and right-minded of our theology (namely the Calvinist one), to which you have sworn, with which you seem to protect those who cannot be suspect in themselves, is now well known. What shall I do? Because I have loved and still love your salvation, I ask and exhort you not to consider it heartless and harsh to be a Davus a reference to a cunning slave character in Terence's plays, often implying a troublemaker in this fable, and a claw or nail in the boils or wounds of the Church. God has adorned you with special gifts and graces for such building up and not for storming, which I have recognized in you at all times. Remember in short how heavy an account you must give for all of this. Therefore, be intent on this alone, and act such that you do not have need of so many excuses, defensive writings, and similar justifications: so that you may publicly and sincerely commit yourself to the camp from which you acquired your weapons, or in the same way give up and leave the opposing party. If you do neither of these two things, you will indeed continue for a time to mock the learned and deceive the unlearned, but too late you will discover with what heavy